Governor Nikki Haley: New Horizons

After riding into office on a wave of Tea Party enthusiasm, South Carolina governor Nikki Haley now faces a fractious Republican Party. How conservative will she go?

On a warm morning in early March, governor Nikki Haley calls three members of the South Carolina state legislature into her office. They look like truants sent in to see the principal: Haley is earnest and stern, smartly turned out in a black-and-white ruffled jacket, black pencil skirt, and platform stilettos, while the legislators, in baggy suits and cowboy boots, fidget and make excuses. The stakes seem pretty low—they are arguing over a restructuring of the department of transportation that would give Haley more control over it—but one gray-haired representative gets so angry his hands start to shake. He sulkily asks the governor whether she will even be around much longer to see through the agenda she is pressing on them.

The unspoken assumption here is that Haley, who had endorsed Mitt Romney for president before the South Carolina primary a few weeks earlier, has her eye on a spot on the Romney ticket. Haley assures the representative that she is in South Carolina to stay. “People ask the question, ‘If you’re offered VP, would you take it?’ ” she says after the legislators have left. “No, I won’t take it. I’m not going to leave the people that just gave me this chance.”

For nearly 232 years, South Carolinians reliably selected a white male to be their governor, but somehow, in 2010, they chose Haley: 38, Indian-American, a woman. (It might have helped that her predecessor, Mark Sanford, had recently showcased the hazards of allowing men into the highest seat of power.) In her campaign for the nomination she secured the endorsement of both Romney and Sarah Palin—a pairing you probably won’t see again anytime soon. Since then, she’s routinely been called a rising star in the party, which, when you’re talking about a governor, is code for White House–bound.

Her office, on the ground floor of the state house in Columbia, is just feet away from a Civil War memorial that flies the Confederate flag, but inside it is a different South Carolina. On a shelf is the July 12, 2010, issue of Newsweek, with Haley on the cover striking a confident pose next to the words “The face of the new South.” Behind her desk sits a model of a Boeing 787 from an assembly facility that opened near Charleston last June. And bustling in and out are her staff, who look as though they were piped in directly from a College Republicans meeting. The governor herself is relentlessly upbeat: On the stump she can sound like a motivational speaker. She has trained her team to answer the phone with “It’s a great day in South Carolina!” She repeats the phrase many times over the course of the day.

Haley in person looks even younger than her age: fit and attractive, with a face free of worry lines. She and her advisers stand out from the rest of the Republicans in state government, a chummy bunch of white-haired men who spend a lot of time in the hallways of the state house telling jokes and greeting one another with intimate arm grasps. When I ask her if her colleagues still treat her like a freshman legislator, she insists that “they do recognize that I’m the governor now.” But still, she continues, leaning forward confidingly, “it’s different for the guys upstairs. This is the first time they’ve had a female governor; it’s the first time they’ve had a minority governor.”

Haley is the youngest governor in the nation, one of the scrappy radicals swept into office by the Tea Party in November 2010, and she’s tried to retain the vigor of those heady days. The transition has been a struggle: How do you govern after promising revolution? In Washington, the answer is simple: Throw your body against the gears of President Obama’s government. But in South Carolina, Haley has a state to run, hence the diligent courting of the legislators in her office.

The Tea Party, though, may be the most easily disappointed group of voters in the country. As soon it became clear that Haley would not simply hang a for sale sign on the state house and call it a day, her supporters began to desert her. Then her endorsement of Romney (a perceived moderate) really enraged them, leading several to claim they were duped by the governor—that she wasn’t a true conservative at all. Karen Martin, a Tea Party organizer who supported Haley’s election bid, told Bloomberg News that the state’s conservatives were “angry, disappointed, betrayed, hurt.” Haley, though, was convinced that Romney would be the nominee: “I think he’s going to get bruised and battered, but I think that’s what the public wanted to see. They wanted to see somebody that could take that.”

The truth is that Haley may be facing the same sort of battle herself. One statewide poll taken in December had her approval rating at 35 percent. When Romney was routed by Newt Gingrich in the state primary, a former supporter posted a message on Haley’s Facebook wall: “never forget who elected you Ms Haley—the TEA PARTY just spoke loud and clear to you.” The governor is in danger of pleasing no one: too conservative for Democrats and independents, and too pragmatic for the people who voted her into office.

Haley has just written a memoir, Can’t Is Not an Option, that recounts her remarkable rise in South Carolina politics. She was born Nimrata Nikki Randhawa in 1972 in Bamberg, a town of a few thousand people midway between Charleston and Columbia. Her parents are from the Punjab, and moved to South Carolina in 1969, raising four children there. Her older brother Mitti remembers Nikki as a happy-go-lucky tomboy with a knack for bringing people together. “She always said she wanted to be the mayor of Bamberg,” he tells me.

Haley’s description of her early life is filled with affection for her hometown, even as she admits that her skin color left her feeling isolated at times. “They didn’t know much about the Indian culture, and we didn’t know much about how to teach it to them,” she says. The family remained close even after the children left for college; Nikki went to Clemson, in the northwest corner of the state—where she met her husband, Michael, now a member of the South Carolina National Guard—and ended up working for her mother’s clothing store for several years before she entered politics (it provides a good portion of the governor’s wardrobe). It was her time doing the books for the store, she claims, that led her to her small-government, anti-tax philosophy.

When she first pondered a run for the state legislature, she says, “I didn’t even know if I was Republican or Democrat.” The young Republicans she knew in college were “way too stiff.” But her friends quickly set her straight: “Once I started talking about my views, they were like, ‘God, you’re a Republican!’ ” It was, however, a speech by Hillary Clinton at a 2003 conference at a local university that inspired her to run. “She said there will be all of these reasons that people tell you you can’t do it. She said that there’s only one reason for you to do it, and it’s because you know it’s the right thing. I walked out of there thinking, I’ve got to do this,” she says. Haley has gotten heat from Republicans for crediting Clinton in the past, and she is quick to assure me that when it comes to policy, the more relevant role model is Margaret Thatcher.

Her ascent up the political ranks in South Carolina was swift but bumpy. In 2004 she defeated a 30-year incumbent to take a seat in the state House of Representatives. That campaign was nasty enough: Fliers distributed in support of her opponent listed his qualifications as “white male/Christian/business owner” and hers as “Indian female/Buddhist/housekeeper.” (Haley is a Sikh turned Christian.) But it was the Republican primary for governor that Haley says was the hardest to bear. Shortly before the election, two men—one a former employee of hers, the other an employee of her opponent—accused Haley of having had affairs with them, a charge she steadfastly denied, promising to resign should any proof of the allegations emerge. The voters either believed her or didn’t care, but the experience shook her up. “Before I had run for governor,” she writes in the book, “Michael and I had sat down and talked through the worst that my opponents could throw at me. But I had never anticipated this.”

In the governor’s mansion, the peculiar path of the last half century of South Carolina politics plays out in the artwork: Strom Thurmond gazes sternly at Mark Sanford, and John C. Calhoun’s ghoulish visage watches over a framed photograph of the Haleys’ daughter, Rena, thirteen, and son, Nalin, ten. Haley works hard to set aside time for her family: She sees the children off to school each morning and makes sure they do their chores at night. (Michael Haley tells me that one consequence of promising to shrink government is that the family can’t hire additional staff for the residence. Looks like Rena and Nalin may be stuck making their own beds for a while.)

Aptly enough for the country’s youngest governor, Haley uses Facebook to present a carefully curated look into her home life: the dog escaping the grounds; Nalin adopting two frogs; Rena giving her fish a funeral. Michael says that South Carolina’s tight band of former first ladies has been “intrigued” to have a man in their midst, and were quick to encourage him in the tradition of a governor’s spouse, to take up a cause. (He has devoted himself to at-risk youth.) Though he keeps his hair close-cropped and dresses in fatigues most days, he appears more easygoing than his wife, which may explain how, in a bit of relationship jujitsu, Governor Haley persuaded Michael, né William, to start going by his middle name shortly after they started dating. He looked more like a “Michael,” she says.

At home and at work, the governor likes to surround herself with music. At she sits at her desk between meetings, she mutes the Fox News broadcast that loops from a flat-screen monitor and turns up the volume on her iPad to listen to the bands she likes: late-seventies and early-eighties groups with strong female singers such as Fleetwood Mac, the Go-Go’s, Starship, and her “favorite of all time,” Joan Jett. (Jett, who donated to Obama’s campaign in 2008, might not necessarily return the love.)

“This is not about making friends or having people like me,” Haley says, a defiant tone in her voice. “It’s about producing results for the people of this state.” Results is the word Haley uses probably more than any other (with a possible challenger in challenges), and by results she normally means jobs. One prominent scuffle last year involved her standoff with Obama and the National Labor Relations Board, which sought to delay the opening of the Boeing plant in North Charleston over a union dispute. The governor brags that “we’re one of the least unionized states in the country,” and manufacturing jobs are indeed returning to South Carolina to take advantage of the cheaper workforce. Although she’s in line with Republicans on social issues—when I asked her, she couldn’t name a position in which she bucks the party platform—it’s the tenets of fiscal conservatism that seem to inspire her the most: fewer taxes, fewer regulations, fewer unions. “Government,” she writes in her book, “is the deadweight we all drag behind us.”

That message—a government that gets out of the way, lower taxes, and anger at the status quo—could resonate with a large group of voters, especially if it’s delivered by a charismatic young woman rather than a cranky old man like Ron Paul. The Tea Party turns its back on Haley at its peril. “She’s a symbol of diversity,” says Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, “yet she represents the Republican philosophy. The public hasn’t connected the dots yet, but eventually they will.”

If the Republicans want to win elections sooner rather than later, they’d better connect those dots quickly. Not all Republicans look like Republicans, and someone like Haley may represent the last chance the party has to reach the very voters—women, young people, and minorities—that Romney and Rick Santorum are currently driving away. For the governor, the relevant lesson comes from her childhood: “We were the only Indian family in that small town,” she says, “so the challenge of growing up in Bamberg was the fact that I had to acknowledge that I was different but somehow find similarities to bring me together with people.”

Bamberg is a little more than an hour away from the capital, and well away from the interstate. The drive there takes you past bottomland filled with cypress trees and old plantation homes, and a landing strip called Dry Swamp airport. Haley and her staff mentioned several times that Bamberg had erected a sign with her picture on it at the town limits, and indeed, right as you pull in on highway 301, there it is.

The previous governor of South Carolina lived on a 1,500-acre plantation near the coast; it’s amazing to think that the current incumbent comes from this place of closed-down motels and decaying municipal buildings. When I stop in at Main Street Garden and Gifts, Dean Sandifer, the proprietor, offers to show me the small brick house where Haley grew up. Sandifer is five years older than the governor but remembers playing tennis with her when they were kids. He always knew she was smart, he says, but he couldn’t have imagined she’d end up where she has. He doesn’t say whom he voted for last time, but he supports her now. He seems like a lot of South Carolinians I talked to: a little puzzled by how they got to where they are, somewhat skeptical about what Haley has accomplished, but eager to see what their governor does next.